Comment by rustynails | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rustynails | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Pick a criteria, any meaningful criteria. Now line a room full of people up in order of that criteria. What do you see? I see a mixed line of races, genders, heights, skin colours, etc.

Why am I pointing this out? Because while this article sounds wise, it's not. It's also a shallow thought pattern of generalising.

A woman's view is somehow different from a man's. Really? Someone who has cancer (as an example) might want to work from home (even IF they're male). The mindset of this article is baffling (especially when the article isn't pushing gender discrimination, unlike many similar articles).

Nobody should be penalised for taking slabs of time off work. True! Just penalise the ones that don't take time off (ie. by ignoring those consistently available as providing no extra value), or better yet, put everyone on part time! In reality, a smart boss/business will promote someone who is there when needed!

The author of this article started with a prejudiced premise (ie. sees the world as genders). Considering that starting point, the article was unusually inclusive for an article that thinks in genders. However, I don't really care about a person's gender. So, articles like this stand out as demonstrating shallow and flawed thinking.

As I once said to my wife "why don't people ask about redheads in engineering?"

Do you have an ethical objection to surveying under-represented groups on general questions?

To me this is no different than "ask a black engineer, ask college dropout engineer, ask an engineer working in a developing country, ask a house husband, ask an engineer who grew up in the projects, ask an engineer who didn't study cs, etc."

The point is for me to get a perspective from a background that I don't have. To me that adds value.

Wow, that your comment got downvotes is baffling! Well, not really. But it should be!

I certainly agree with you, its really weird that people think its wrong to ask women for their opinion. Maybe they just had a really bad experience on a date when they asked what she wanted to eat? (badom-tsh!)

Going along on that tangent, who here has a male spouse that has a really hard time deciding what to eat? (I know enough examples in the other direction, thank you for asking. You are of course welcome to come with examples outside the binay, the more diverse the merrier)

Sure, but the subtler point is -- what is a group? How do we cluster people together?

I'm very stable (decades of medication) and no one in my workplace knows about it, but I have a mental illness; a rather serious one, too. And Jesus would it be cringeworthy to see the mentally ill parade their quirkiness in "Meet the engineers"-type situations. Cringeworthy and potentially damaging if I was "out of the closet" as it were.

I'm my own person. But just as I'm grouped as "privileged" (white, male, straight, cis, not drinking too much) by some clustering schemes -- and my "voice" somehow doesn't matter, I'm also grouped as "oppressed" which doesn't serve me better.

I'll leave you with some Emerson on pitying the underprivileged:

----------

Expect me not to show cause why I seek or why I exclude company. Then, again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison, if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold Relief Societies; — though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.

A group in this context is a set of persons who share a property, in this case their gender.

As to the larger point you are trying to make, I'm sorry, you didn't manage to make one. It is true that any given person can be simultaneously in a privileged group and an underprivileged group (I'm both a man and a very short person), but this is a rather trivial observation much like saying that it can be both night and that at a particular place on Earth.

We get it, people have different possibilities in different contexts, what a remarkable observation! Now stop trying to restrict the possibilities women have to express their experiences, and dragging out a quote from Emerson about how he really dislikes the poor (which he can well do in the privacy of his own dead head or just generally away from me) does not count as discussion.

The point of the series is to get women's perspectives. That you "don't really care about a person's gender" is irrelevant. (Plus, from a privileged position—I'm assuming you're male—a pretty easy position to take.) Women are underrepresented in tech. This is an effort to ask members of an underrepresented group questions and get their thoughts. What's the issue?

I get sun-burnt really easily. I need a company that supports that with cheap health-care and aloe in the company kitchen.

Just kidding.

- redhead engineer

> As I once said to my wife "why don't people ask about redheads in engineering?"

Is there evidence that redheads are under-represented (proportional to their representation in overall society) in technical roles in the software industry?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com